What’s love got to do with it?

The setting for Il tabarro, the first drama in Puccini’s 1918 triptych of one-act operas, is not the Paris of tourists and honeymooners, nor even the Paris of impoverished poets and painters. On a bend in the Seine a Dutch barge is moored at a soot-blackened wharf. A tableau of stevedores and seamstresses unfreezes. Sirens blast through the oily haze of muted violins. A tart touts for trade. There is no romance here: no first love, no new love, no true love. Just ordinary sadness and ordinary yearning: a marriage bruised beyond repair, a dead child kept alive in his father’s memory, and a futile and fatal affair.

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The first revival of Richard Jones’s Il trittico sees a new conductor at the helm, Nicola Luisotti, and several key cast changes. On the opening night, the balance was problematic. Luisotti indulges his players at the expense of his singers, who sometimes struggle to keep pace and be heard over the brazen glow of Puccini’s orchestrations. Still, the core is strong. Vocally and theatrically all three works are realised with scrupulous attention to human weakness, the engine of each story. Who are we, for example, to blame Giorgetta (Patricia Racette) for wanting to escape the floating prison of her marriage and the airless confines of a space ‘between the bed and the stove’ in Il tabarro? Racette is touching, alert to the text and unselfish in her awkward little dance, a weary housewife’s spin on a Josephine Baker routine. She is, however, forced into acting for two opposite Carl Tanner’s brightly sung but opaque Luigi and Lucio Gallo’s quiet-toned Michele.

In Il tabarro, Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante sets the visual mood. In Suor Angelica, we’re with Powell and Pressburger. Crowned with a halo of chiming bells, chaste flutes and radiant strings, Ermonela Jaho holds the anguish of Angelica’s unanswered prayer in her eyes.